Where the heck can dancing take us?

By Guest Author Sarah Oppenheimer

There is a long history of arts-for-peace groups focusing on promoting peace practices and influencing people to think about their own interpretations of peace. Contemporary groups include the Peace Education through the Arts Culture and Exposure (PEACE) (http://arts-for-peace.org) and Create Peace Project (http://createpeaceproject.org).

 

The Peace Education through the Arts Culture and Exposure group describes themselves as seeking to imagine a future celebrating the plenitude and diversity of the world’s cultures within three major objectives:

  •  Focusing on our shared human interests in peace, equity, and justice by providing fora in which the arts provide an expressive vocabulary for the examination of social and political issues affecting our communities.
  • Creating a space in which visual and performing artists can acknowledge difference and advocate creative, nonviolent conflict resolution by engaging with each other and their audiences, especially young people.
  • Relying on the arts as a platform for social innovation and peace education, in order to inspire hope and build bridges across cultures.(http://arts-for-peace.org)

The video at the beginning of this post features Matt Harding who, in 2012, began traveling around the world, because he wanted to dance with people from different countries. His video is an enthusiastic display of how people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds can engage joyously with each other. It reflects the philosophy behind Dance for Peace, which “creates a container where each person can find their own peace, not by suppressing their difficult emotions, but by celebrating them through creative and healing outlets: Dancing, conscious breathing, chanting, drumming, hugging, laughing, crying.” (http://danceforpeace.com/)

 

Sarah Oppenheimer is a student studying psychology and philosophy at Boston University. She currently works as a research assistant in the Translational Research Program at BU’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders and BU’s Social Development and Learning Lab. She is also currently President of BU’s Undergraduate Psychology Association. She took Psychology of War and Peace with Professor Kathleen Malley-Morrison